On the seat was a pamphlet, which I picked up. It was the program for the festival, all the guests listed on one side and the schedule of activities on the other. I was aghast to realize that for festival guests the regular off-train excursions—the crystal waters of Katherine Gorge, the red-dirt hiking of Alice Springs—had been replaced by “conversations” on board. Though it looked like we still got to explore the subterranean opal-mining city of Coober Pedy, which was a relief.
I scanned the names and tried to absorb them. I’d already encountered Wolfgang, whose bio was of too high a literary pedigree to include the phrase “he lives in the Blue Mountains with his partner and two dogs” and contained a list of awards so dense they’d had to shrink the font just to squeeze his entry in. I knew Henry McTavish’s work. The other three were Lisa Fulton, who wrote legal thrillers; Alan Royce, who wrote forensics-based crime; and S. F. Majors, who wrote psychological thrillers and lived in the Blue Mountains with her partner and two dogs.
“You can have the view,” Juliette said. She fumbled underneath the window until she found a latch and flicked up a small table that had been folded to the wall. She gestured to it with a magician’s flourish: “Ta-da! Those thousand words don’t stand a chance.”
Even her good spirits couldn’t lift my funk, but I appreciated her attempt enough to put on the performance of taking out my laptop and notebook and setting them up by the window. Juliette took a seat by the door and started flipping through an advance copy of S. F. Majors’s new psychological thriller, which she’d been asked to blurb. It seemed a deliberate attempt to block me from conversation, and so I took the hint and opened my notebook.
To tell you the truth, the notes I did have were scant. While I’d studied all the rules of successful mystery fiction, I had no shape of plot or character on which to apply them. Last time I’d just written down what happened. Now I had to come up with it all from, God forbid, my own brain. The only thing I’d written in my notebook was a list of structural notes: what needed to happen in each section of the book, and at which stage of the word count these events should happen.
My list was:
10,000 words: Introduce characters, victims and suspects
20,000 words: Explore motives (note: 90% of clues to solve the crime already present)
30,000 words: MURDER
40,000 words: Suspects identified, investigated, interviews
50,000 words: Red herrings + character development (romance?)
60,000 words: A second murder
70,000 words: Action scene? (must include: ALL IS LOST moment)
80,000 words: Mystery solved
I’d broken it down like that in the hope that it might not seem so intimidating in smaller pieces. The last time Simone had checked in on my progress, I’d actually been confident enough to email it off to her, and she’d emailed back Great idea, back to basics, which seemed at the time more like an endorsement and less like the put-down that it probably was. But now, my list only reminded me of the volume of words ahead. Eighty thousand of the pesky things. I’d need to catch a hundred trains.
I took a deep breath, turned to a new page and wrote: Setting: Train.
Then beneath it, I wrote: Been done before. Obviously.
If you’re wondering, we’re a smidge over six thousand words thus far, which leaves me three and a half to ensure you’ve met everyone you need to: victims, killers and suspects. But instead I’m wasting time, writing about how I’m staring at a blank page, worried about wasting time. Nothing for it but to get started. No distractions.
My phone rang.
Just quickly: if you’re expecting this sequel to be replete with returning characters, you’ve got the wrong book. I get it, it’s nice and tidy when all the favorites come back for the sequel, but this is real life. How implausible would it be if all of my surviving extended family simply found themselves at the center of another murder mystery? It’s unlucky enough—or lucky if you ask Simone’s checkbook—that it’s happened to me twice, let alone the rest of them. I’m on good terms with my ex-wife, Erin, but we’re more casual acquaintances these days than a crime-solving duo. My mother, Audrey, my stepfather, Marcelo, and my stepsister, Sofia, would hardly be enthused by the prospect of sitting on a train for a week. They’re at a wedding in Spain actually. To be honest, if they wouldn’t mind doing me a favor and stumbling on a murder there, I could use the trip and the tax deduction for another book.
My point is: real life doesn’t have cameos.
I picked up the phone. It was my uncle Andy.
You need to know a few things about Andy. The first is that he’s a horticulturist, which means his job is to grow grass on football fields. Perhaps in contrast to the slowness of his job, he’s keen to make fast friendships and tends to reflect back the personality of whoever he’s talking to rather than being himself, in the hope it will make him more appealing. Unfortunately this often only succeeds in making him the loudest voice with the least conviction. He is, suitably to his profession, a man often trodden on.
He’s also a man who believes that youth is a fish that can be reeled back in. We’d recently thought he might have come to terms with his vintage (midfifties)—he’d at last shaved off his terrible goatee—but that hope was quickly dashed when he emerged with his hair bleached platinum blond. We’d all bitten our lips, except Sofia, never short of a barb, who’d asked what had frightened him so much.
I answered the video call to a nearly medical insight into Andy’s nostrils. I rolled my eyes at Juliette while he fumbled with the camera. The picture spun blurrily, the scuffling sounds masking a hushed argument happening just off-mic, the snipes no doubt coming from my aunt Katherine.
Katherine is my late father’s little sister. A wild youth had been transformed by a tragic accident into an uptight adulthood. She’s a stickler for rules: her star sign may as well be School Principal. She roots for the umpires and is the type of person who says, with a completely straight face, “How could you forget? It’s in the calendar.”
Katherine is at her happiest when she’s got something to fix, so Andy, who has the unfortunate affliction of doing most things incorrectly, really is the perfect match for her.
Another thing you need to know about Andy is that he wasn’t too happy with how he was portrayed in the first book. He’s adamant that I made him look like a bumbling airhead and he had more of a role in piecing together the mystery than I gave him credit for. He accused me of emasculating him, a word he repeated so often I was fairly sure both that it was new to him and that Katherine had taught him what it meant. He’d especially taken aim at a passage in which I’d referred to him as a terrifically boring man. I’d pointed out that technically I’d called him terrific, but even he wasn’t falling for that one. So I’ll try to do a bit better this time.
“Ernest! How are you, buddy?” Andy said, handsomely.
“We’ve just boarded the Ghan.” I spun the camera so he could see the cabin. “Just waiting to set off.”
Andy whistled. “You’re a lucky sod, mate. I’d love to go one day. I don’t know if you know this”—he lowered his voice, like it was a secret—“but I’m considered a bit of an amateur ferroequinologist myself.”
It’s rare that Andy’s vocabulary bamboozles me, but that was a word I had to look up later. It’s a decidedly languid way of saying one has an interest in “iron horses,” aka trains. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Andy, to whom the length of grass is a passion, was also a fan of trains.